This conference will be accompanied by a series of research seminars focused on the its theme. We hope these sessions will encourage an ongoing conversation about (infra)structures as a way of being in and understanding contemporary culture and help build a research community in and around Coventry interested in these and related topics.
SEMINAR SCHEDULE:
All seminars are free and open to all. No booking necessary.
External visitors - please report to the Lanchester Library reception on arrival for directions.
12 February 2020
4:30 - 6:00
Attention, Habit, Becoming in India’s Platform Ecologies
Dr Amit Rai (Queen Mary, University of London)
DMLL Teaching Room, Lancaster Library (3rd Floor)
Coventry University
This presentation of on-going research considers participatory action research on the political economy of India’s media ecologies, or what I will also refer to as a decolonising political ecology of media. My interest here is in practically diagramming an antogonistic domain of platform monopoly, information control, value extraction, dispossession, and exploitation, and also digital piracy, technological tinkering and repurposing, and collective lines of autonomous flight and social reproduction that techniques of control attempt to capture and revalue: this is the simultaneously global and singular domain of the reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation of attention and habit today. In recent studies, the political economy of media has expanded beyond ‘Western’ capitalist intellectual property regulatory regimes and complexified beyond the (post)human; in these researches ecological thought has become more materialist and processual. These new materialist methods shift our focus from the social construction of fetishized, reified media platforms (film, TV, radio) toward the actually existing infrastructures of communication and information, their complex processes of value and sense, their vector-tendencies of resistance and violence within which all forms of media are co-evolving today. This presentation considers the practices and discourses surrounding 'jugaad' (everyday workarounds) and social media platforms in India in relation to recent articulations of political theory: Invisible Committee's Now (2017) and Mario Tronti's Workers and Capital (1965).
Dr. Amit S. Rai is Reader in Creative Industries and Arts Organising at Queen Mary, University of London, where he has also taught critical marketing studies and business ethics. He is author of Rule of Sympathy: Race, Sentiment, Power 1760-1860 (Palgrave, 2002) and Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage (Duke UP, 2009). He has taught at the New School for Social Research, Florida State University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and Lorton Maximum Security Prison. His current research touches on critical management and organizational studies of the creative and cultural industries in the UK and India, the gendering of affective labor in social reproduction in India, media practices of commoning, and hacking and piracy ecologies in the UK and South Asia. His monograph on work-around practices in Indian urban digital ecologies, Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India, was published in 2019 by Duke University Press.
11 March 2020
1:00 - 2:30
Post Office Press, Experimental Publishing infrastructures workshop
During this session we (Janneke, Maddalena, Rebekka) would like to further think through and workshop together with CPC colleagues the publication we intend to create for the (Infra)Structures Conference. This publication will be published by POP (Post Office Press) and will be based on the specific media format of the index card. Using the index card as an infrastructural tool for knowledge production, we would like to network and connect some of the ideas, concepts, thoughts, practices and agencies that the conference conjures up and brings together. To do so we will use the index card as an instrument to create a relational, collaborative, post-digital knowledge network and ultimately, a publication for the conference. During this workshop we will introduce the index card as an important research technology and node within knowledge production and we will outline how we intend to use it practically before, during and after the conference. This will be followed by a short collective brainstorming session, in which participants will have the possibility to give feedback and to experimentally co-collaborate on the production of the index cards as publication.
A reading group discussion on infrastructure, automation and instability with Andrew Goffey, facilitated by Peter Conlin (Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University)
Often analysis of infrastructure and larger human-machine relations—such as Paul N Edwards—makes certain assumptions between infrastructures and stability. From this, the constancy of infrastructure has a normalising power in everyday life, and failure and breakdown are revelatory because, in such exceptional conditions, the normally hidden and unacknowledged becomes salient. But what if infrastructure and instability are interwoven, and breakage not exceptional but constitutive in current practices and culture? Such infrastructures are made through and for instability, mess and precariousness, fully imbricated in processes through which subjectivation happens.
Andrew Goffey is an Associate Professor in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham. He works in grey areas between media, philosophy, science and technology studies and politics; and explores the role of digital technologies, and more specifically, software, in shaping contemporary culture. Past research includes looking at the 'information revolution' in the NHS, a project looking at the globalisation of the mundane aesthetics of the creative and cultural industries, and an ESRC-funded project on the digital commons.
With Roland Faber, he has edited The Allure of Things, a collection of essays on process and object-oriented approaches to philosophy, including work by Isabelle Stengers and by Graham Harman, amongst others; as well as The Guattari Effect (with Éric Alliez); and co-authored Evil Media with Matthew Fuller. Andrew has also produced a number of valuable translations, including Félix Guattari’s Schizonalytic Cartographies, Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre’s Capitalist Sorcery, David Lapoujade Powers of Time and Jean-Claude Polack Intimate Utopia.
13 May 2020
4:30 - 6:00
Monstrosity: an infrastructures of estrangement
Dr Francesca Coin (Lancaster University)
George Elliot Building, Room 511
Coventry University
This paper analyses monstrosity as an infrastructure of estrangement that has cronicled the introduction of austerity in the recent financial crisis. It draws on Polanyi (1947) to argue that the devastating effects of the recent financial crisis brought the democratic system to a deadlock, caused on the one hand by the dire need for reform imposed by the consequences of austerity and on the other hand by the impossibility of reform caused by market pressures and capital flights (Polanyi, 1957:140). In this deadlock, legitimacy depended upon the ability to present austerity as a necessary evil in order to prevent the undeserving poor from becoming “a parasitical drain upon scarce resources" (Tyler, 2013: 211). Drawing on Francis Bacon's theory of monstrosity, this paper analyses mostrosity as a lable placed on the dispossessed to legitimate a “permanent state of austerity”. It also dedicates part of the session to collectively investigate how colonial fantasies have been mobilised to produce monstrosity and undermine class solidarity thus often normalising an authoritarian turn, “a possibility of transcending the deadlock [...] at the price of the extirpation of all democratic institutions” (Polanyi, 1957:140).
Francesca Coin is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on the intersectional dimensions of social inequality in the recent financial crisis. She has published extensively on the mental health and working conditions of industrial, precarious, unpaid, academic and digital labourers. She is currently working on the process of de-globalisation and on the role of monstrosity in concealing the crisis of legitimacy of the neoliberal turn. She is the PI of the research project The nature of money and its social perception in times of crisis funded by the Humanities and Social Change International Foundation (2018-2020).
